Lowlights from the Highlights of Vatican II, part 1

In my last post I listed a few things I would like to track in Ratzinger’s thought over the following year.  My list was short by one, because I wanted to dedicate an entire post to the biggest item:  his shallow rejection of scholasticism.

This attitude runs throughout his report.  The usual rhetoric is engaged:  because scholasticism emerged in the middle ages, which was also the age when the eastern churches split away, anything biblical or patristic or eastern is good while anything medieval or western is bad.  (I rather suspect this hatred of all things western, rooted in a rejection of scholasticism, is what stands behind his harsh comments on the use of Latin in the liturgy and in Church documents.)

The rejection of the middle ages is not a subtle theme:  twice he repeats a line making the rounds at the council to the effect that Vatican II was “the end of the middle ages, and perhaps of the Constantian period”—and it is clear enough that if anything ever needed ending it was the middle ages.  So for example he says on page 127 that references to Lombard, Albert, Bonaventure, and Aquinas “will no longer be meaningful” for a theology of the episcopacy; whatever the merits of this claim, it is stated in a manner so sweeping as to signal the author’s desire to express not merely the truth but his personal disdain for the period.  Similarly, on pages 103-104 he refers to the

…frightful error of St. Thomas who thought it necessary to correct the gospel in suggesting that there is no need to await the day of judgment.  Teaching in a closed Christian society, he said that it was praiseworthy and salutary to weed out elements of evil and destroy sinners on our own authority (S. Th. 2-2, q. 64, a. 3 c ad 1).

If there is any “frightful error” here it is Ratzinger’s interpretation of Thomas.  I would invite anyone to read the text cited from St. Thomas and judge whether it asserts the need to weed out sinners on our own authority.  In fact, it does not seem to me possible that Ratzinger himself looked at the text before citing it; I think that he got that talking point together with its supporting reference from a conversation during the council and never had a chance to check it.  At this point, Ratzinger comes across as hurried, excited, caught up in the moment.

As I said above, it seems to me that this rejection of the middle ages is rooted not in a real hatred for what he has read of the medieval—Ratzinger wrote his dissertation on Bonaventure—but in a loathing for what he calls “scholasticism” or “neo-scholasticism” and which he associates with the middle ages.  Anyone who has seen the theology manuals in use in the first half of the 20^th century will have a sense of why one might hate it, but in Highlights Ratzinger joins many others of his generation in throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

In my next post, I’ll go into some of the details.

 

Items to track

In his introduction to Theological Highlights of Vatican II, Ratzinger explains that his purpose was not so much a history or a theology of the council as to give the reader a share in the experience of the council.  Given this, it is interesting to track the emotional arc of his reports.  He describes the first session with joy but caution and precision, always granting at least verbal respect to both sides of any debate.  The second and third sessions show him caught up more and more in certain patterns of shallow rhetoric, and his animosity towards “scholasticism” becomes open and unnuanced.  The epilogue to the fourth session, however, brings us back to a more sober Ratzinger, already displeased with the attitudes evoked in some by the council, and especially by the shallow rhetoric that would make everything dark before the council and everything light after it.  As his comments on this period in Milestones show, the aftermath of the council brought him many surprises.

I would like to track certain points in Highlights where I suspect (or know) that Ratzinger changed his mind over time.  Among these are:

1) At a number of points, Ratzinger indicates his positive dislike of Latin as the language of the liturgy and of the Church.  He views it as a dead language and an impediment both to the development of theology and to the layperson’s active participation in the liturgy.  Since I have spent the past several months teaching Latin as a living language, I will be particularly curious to follow this thread through the year.

2) Next comes a network of issues surrounding the notion of “Church”.  On page 75, Ratzinger strongly approves calling protestant communities “churches”, although he will be head of the CDF when the Congregation outlaws this very nomenclature.  It will be interesting to see what changed and why.  His opinion in Highlights is connected with the need for the realization that the Church is the local community rather than only the mega-community headed up by the pope; on page 72, he seems to imply that lack of a sense of local church caused the reformation—an astonishing statement which I would also like to track.  Finally, in this connection he says in more than one place that individual conversions from Protestantism to Roman Catholicism will have to be “replaced”—his word—with the incorporation of communities that retain their identities as communities.  Certainly BXVI has tried to do that with conservative Anglicans and with the SSPX, but I wonder how his emphases will shift over the years regarding individual conversion.

3) Why on earth would he say (page 175) that the association between priest and sacrifice is in contradiction to the New Testament?  What about the letter to the Hebrews?  I’ll have to see what more there is to know about this debate.

 

The Spirit of Vatican II

During Ratzinger’s first year as a peritus at Vatican II, he published an essay titled (in English) “Primacy, Episcopacy, and Successio Apostolica“.  The opening gambit of the essay is intriguing:  he posits that any living thought will not be reducible to a single, simple statement but will be approached by the apposition of seemingly opposed statements.  So one must set alongside one another the Church’s defined faith about the absolute primacy of the pope and her firm statements about the inherent (not delegated) authority of the bishops.

While it is true that a kind of asymptotic approach is often best in theology, affirming on the one hand this and on the other hand that, one would also like to see some attempt to explain how the two categories of statement are not simply opposed.  There must be a third thing, a mediating principle, between the two asymptotic lines.  When Ratzinger comes to this point, he hesitates.  First he says that the central approach would be to treat the Church as communio, which of course he does in his later works at some length.  But here he backs away and turns instead to a distinction between “the Church of the word” and “the Church of the sacrament”–a distinction which does not entirely convince as the essay unfolds.  While he offers some fascinating historical background on papal and episcopal authority, it does not really offer a per se view of the relationship between them.

The meatiest observation, and what seems to me the heart of the essay, comes towards the end.  Ratzinger says that the Pope’s very reason for being is to ensure a unity, and for the that very reason he needs the bishops whose unity he insures.  One cannot have a guarantee of the unity of nothing of any consequence; the Pope is only the Pope if the bishops are also something on their own.

After the first session of the Council, Ratzinger wrote a popular report on what had happened, later published as the first section of Theological Highlights of Vatican II.  In that article, he stressed that the most important event of the first session is that the bishops discovered one another:

Out of the distress of the hour, then, something really new and needed had come back — the development of a “horizontal Catholicity,” with cross-connections among those who call themselves Catholic.  Yves Congar had stressed such bonds as a necessary complementary element to the “vertical” unity joining all to the center of the Church.  For, as the start of the Council had shown, these horizontal connections had actually been lost in the Church’s practical life.  …The Council had taken a giant step beyond being a mere sounding board for propaganda.  It had decisively assumed the function assigned it by canon law — the exercise of supreme power over the entire Church.

It is striking to me that what Ratzinger experienced as the most important event of the first Council session brought home the very insight that forms the kernel of his essay published that year.  Over the next several reports, Ratzinger continued to stress this new (restored) role of the episcopate as at the heart of the Council.  Could it be that here we have the “spirit of Vatican II” yielding a genuine insight?

On the other hand, Ratzinger seems to have published an essay on a very similar theme in 1959, an essay not available to me here in Lander, Wyoming.  It may well be that he already thought this idea important and so was especially struck by that aspect of what took place at the Council’s first session.  If so, then we have a case of theological filters molding Ratzinger’s perception of the true “spirit” of the Council.

Has anyone read the ’59 essay?